(G)OOPs and A Hetero View of Gay Hate Crimes: Shine By Lauren Myracle

Title: Shine by Lauren Myracle

Genre: Contemporary YA Fiction; "Mystery"

Pro-Feminist Content: ★★★

Rage-Induction: >:( >:( >:( >:(

I apologize for the long hiatus. I've just found it hard to find any YA books worth reading. For that matter, I haven't found any books of any genre that were worth reading beyond the first chapter. I'm at a point in my life where I am too busy to stick with something that doesn't interest me, mainly because I don't have a commute anymore so there's no time to read.

I picked up Lauren Myracle's Shine after two significant events in my outside life. The first was getting jury duty on the day that Rutgers student Dharun Ravi was sentenced to thirty days in prison, and being witness to the ensuing brouhaha in both the Indian-American community as well as the gay community in Middlesex County. Full disclosure: I both went to Ravi's high school and am Indian (though I was older than him and did not know him), and I was an active member of my high school's gay-straight alliance group. It was while thinking about the gay bullying incidents that I decided to pick up this book.

The second was after reading Gwenyth Paltrow's dumbass Tweet about black people. The incident--and the reactions to it--were so mind-boggling that I knew that when confronted with that much stupidity, I'd have to take a stand. So that's why I decided to actually blog about the book.


Some of you might find the title familiar; this book was the one that was erroneously placed on the National Book Award Finalist list, and then abruptly removed after the error was discovered. It received a lot of press afterwards, and I did put it on my to-read list since the description sounded interesting.

First I will tackle the cover. It's nice to see cover art that doesn't feature headless girls or thin white chicks wearing poofy prom dresses. It's a painting of a magnolia unfolding in the parched surroundings of what is presumably a run-down farm or barn (pictured on the back cover only). The symbolism of the picture is not apparent; for that matter, the title itself doesn't have an obvious relation to the book's contents, aside from a Bible verse on the title page. Readers, do comment if you have an explanation for either.

The book starts with an interesting twist: there is a newspaper clipping about the alleged hate crime that happened to a young, gay country boy working at a convenience store. I assume that Myracle is trying to set the scene with the rather graphic description of the scene as well as the townspeople's reactions to the crime. However--and I guess that this only applies to us literary/journalistic types who love to nitpick--the character is a minor, and his name is released to the public in this clipping. Never mind that the tone of the article is more of a National Enquirer-tabloid style of interviews, but the kid's full name and family background are written into the account. Half the problem YA novels have is that they feature minors (who in the real world are limited in certain aspects and are protected by adults in others) yet the actions taking place are very adult. If Myracle had aged up the characters, the entire story would bring to mind Matthew Shepard (especially since the victim's description eerily matches that of Shepard) rather than the more recent victims of gay bullying. To me, that would have been something new; a lot of people forget that incident ever happened.

Anyway, in the first few chapters, we meet our narrator, Cat, who is a lapsed friend of the victim, Patrick; we are also introduced to rural North Carolina town of Black Creek. Black Creek is a run-down former mill town, where the residents are either unemployed or part of the new rampant meth industry. As expected, Cat's classmates are all dropouts who are redneck hicks that mock the town's only openly gay kid, and the sheriff is quick to blame out-of-towners for the attack. Thus, Cat takes it upon herself to find out who actually committed the crime.

One thing that is interesting to note is that the crime is not labeled as a hate crime, but instead as an "ethnic" crime because that town has no existing laws on hate crimes. I am 99% sure that Myracle used "ethnic" crime because she couldn't be bothered to look up the synonym "bias attack," which would make much more sense and would cut down on the part where she explains that Patrick is white, but there are no laws regarding gay hate crimes.

Cat is a boring narrator. Myracle tries too hard to make her sound folksy, and to render the townsfolk into hive-minded Jesus-freaks. Immediately I found it hard to sympathize with her because she said she no longer even speaks with Patrick on the regular. She does imply that the reason she doesn't speak to Patrick anymore (or even anyone else, for that matter), is due to the trauma of a rape, but there's no insight into her rape until the last quarter of the book, and even then, her reaction (reticence) remains unexplored. Patrick's attacker is pretty obvious from the get-go even though there's the obvious red herring of Cat's rapist, so there's a total lack of drama to me, though admittedly I didn't quite figure out the motive until the end.

The two biggest issues I had were of the romance between Cat and Jason, and the lack of insight into Patrick's life due to Cat's serious limitations as a narrator.

I'll tackle the Cat-Jason romance first. First of all, I am totally against this idea that a YA novel about a girl has to require romance. The friendship between Cat and Patrick is enough "relationship" to move the novel's events; CatSon is totally extraneous. And the way CatSon meet is the following: Cat goes to the public library to search about Patrick's life-threatening condition, and she happens to sit next to a college-aged boy who then goes on to call her a "mountain n*****".  Cat's reaction is understandably upset, but when she confronts him, she explains "'I'm actually white'" (pg 92), as if being white and being called that word makes him stupid, when it's really the fact that he said that word at all that made him an idiot. This is explained away as stress, and Jason turns out to be from a mountain town even more hick-y that Cat's. Exactly why am I supposed to like a character that uses vile language towards the narrator I'm told to like? Cat's "brush away" attitude bleeds into the pardon of her rapist, as well as the fact that she hides the real killer and his motive and never lets the world know the truth of who committed the crime. Very unfeminist, and thus the high Susan B. Anthony dollar star count.

The single most disappointing thing about this book for me, though, was the complete lack of insight we get into Patrick's life. A big pet peeve of mine is a "cause" book written in the perspective of the majority. For example, Michael Oher's story about his eventual draft to the Baltimore Ravens was told entirely from the perspective of his white adoptive mother.

The most important person is laying in the hospital in a coma for the entirety of the book. Cat even admits she hasn't spoken to Patrick in three-odd years, so the only information we have about Patrick's life and insights come from Cat's flashbacks from when he's pre-pubescent. This provides us with some heteronormative gems such as "'we didn't have sexuality'" as kids (pg 33). Granted I don't think I'm queer, but from what I understand, most actual gay people know very early on that they're gay, kind of like how hetero pre-adults know that they'll marry someone like the parent of the opposite gender, rather than the one of the same gender. For a book that is supposed to stir up latent feelings of sympathy for the broken gay boy, there's no description of his personality at all. After two readings, I still don't feel like I know Patrick at all. In my opinion, this book would have been much stronger if it was written from the perspective of Patrick from his bed, another gay person in a town nearby (maybe even a lesbian!), or even from the perpetrator's perspective. Thus, my high rage-induction score: I am tired of cis-narrators describing non-cis characters.

Overall, this was a promising premise, but ultimately a failure in terms of well-rounded, interesting characters. And here's a bit of shameless promotion if you feel affected by the message of the book: please consider making a small donation to GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network), an organization that helped provide materials for my high school's Gay-Straight Alliance club.